Gracey relied on his Gurkhas and surrendered Japanese to expel the Viet Minh.

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 33.

The Potsdam conference arranged in the summer of 1945 to reorder the world is often viewed through an exclusively European optic, as reflected in the fact that the Big Three were actually the Big Four, for Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was present along with Harry S. Truman (Roosevelt’s successor), Stalin and Churchill. The conference was concerned with winning the ongoing war with Japan and unmaking its empire in South-east Asia. It was decreed that China and Britain should occupy Indochina above and below the 16th parallel, but Al Patti’s OSS units returned to Vietnam, nominally to secure Allied POWs and civilian internees still in Japanese captivity. This gave them a ringside seat to observe how Ho created a fait accompli to pre-empt the restoration of colonial authority. He sent his men into Hanoi across the Doumer Bridge over the Red River to force the abdication of Bao Dai. The capital of Tonkin was bedecked with lanterns, flowers and red banners with the five golden stars, all under the eyes of 30,000 Japanese troops. On 2 September 1945 at a massed meeting on Place Puginier in front of the former Governor-General’s Hanoi Palace, Ho proclaimed Vietnamese independence. There were some deliberate nods to his OSS friends in the wording of his speech:

‘All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ This immortal statement appeared in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, it means: All the peoples on earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live and to be happy and free. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, made at the time of the French Revolution, in 1791, also states: ‘All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights.’

He asked the crowd, ‘My fellow countrymen, have you understood?’‘Yes!’ the crowd roared back. Standing alongside Patti, General Giap gave a clenched-fist salute when the band struck up the ‘Star Spangled Banner’. The French were appalled by this. A more senior US team tried to pin down Ho’s political views, but was fobbed off with evasive vagaries: ‘I have difficulty remembering some parts of my long life. That is the problem of being an old revolutionary.’ Meanwhile his regime in Hanoi made short work of any ideological opponents. In addition to a new state security apparatus, the Communists encouraged the creation of ‘traitor elimination committees’ and an ‘Assault Assassination Committee’ whose victims were liberal nationalists, Trotskyites and women who had married French men.

As the new government established itself, 150,000 Chinese KMT Nationalist troops crossed into Vietnam under a drug-addict warlord Chiang was keen to divert from China. The Viet Minh tried to secure their good conduct by supplying him with opium, but the Chinese looted everything up to the roof tiles. Meanwhile, in the southern capital of Saigon, where the Viet Minh played a much weaker hand as part of a broader nationalist coalition, attempts to celebrate Independence Day led to violent clashes between French and Vietnamese residents. Watching the celebrations from high vantage points, the French ostentatiously refused to join in the applause when independence was proclaimed. French snipers started shooting, and in retaliation Europeans were assaulted and their business premises looted.

Four days later 600 men from the 20th Indian Division arrived in Saigon under General Douglas Gracey to disarm 50,000 surrendered Japanese troops. He was not a political general and inflexibly followed his orders, with disastrous consequences. One of his first acts was to use his Gurkha guard to evict the Southern Provisional Executive Committee from the former Governor-General’s Palace, after they had tried to welcome him. He next rearmed liberated French internees, who promptly attacked any ‘native’ they encountered. Angry Vietnamese retaliated, slaughtering 150 Europeans. With fresh French troops slow to arrive, Gracey relied on his Gurkhas and surrendered Japanese to expel the Viet Minh. He declared martial law to break a general strike and used liberated French Foreign Legionnaires to impose their simulacrum of civil order.

In a remarkable example of intra-Allied incivility Gracey ordered Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Dewey, the senior OSS officer in Saigon, to leave Indochina because of the OSS’s ‘blatantly subversive’ involvement with the Viet Minh. Dewey was shot dead en route to the airport after Gracey forbade him to fly the Stars and Stripes on his Jeep and the Viet Minh mistook him for a Frenchman. The following day Gracey threatened Japanese General Numata with prosecution for war crimes if he did not order his men to help the British and French fight the Viet Minh; and so it was that the British coerced the soldiers who had humiliated them in 1942 to reimpose French rule over Vietnam, which the Japanese had overthrown seven months previously.

By early October 1945 there were sufficient French forces in Cochin China for Gracey to relinquish authority south of the 16th parallel to the Free French war hero General Philippe Leclerc, who re-established French rule in Cambodia and Laos, before turning his attention to the northern Democratic Republic of Vietnam. By 20 January 1946 the British forces were gone. A French high commissioner designate, Jean Sainteny, was flown to Hanoi accompanied by Patti’s OSS team. They noted that Hanoi was swathed in red banners and bedecked with other banners which, in English, read ‘Independence or Death’ and ‘Vietnam for the Vietnamese’. Only a cordon of Japanese troops prevented the French from being lynched, but Patti and his team settled into a comfortable and unthreatened existence at the Hotel Metropole.

I had not realized, until reading Burleigh, the extent to which the Allies depended on surrendered Japanese troops to maintain civil order in former colonial territories for as long as two years after the war. The Japanese surrendered troops served in this role in Vietnam, Indonesia, Burma, Malaysia and elsewhere, while the victorious but exhausted colonial powers of Britain, France and The Netherlands slowly mustered their troops out to the East.